Presently, there are systems and methods for recording and storing presentations and meetings. Due to the linear nature of the recording medium, navigating regions of interest in a particular recording is difficult and time-consuming for consumers. Consumers such as a businessperson or a student lose significant productivity time when they are required to search for a particular segment of a presentation or meeting, given the linear nature of the medium.
This time consuming problem for searching segments of a presentation, given the linear nature of the recording medium, has been confronted with applications such as distance learning or eLearning enabling authors to create indices to particular topics covered in the presentation. Indices allow users, such as students to navigate quickly to a region of interest in a recording medium to find data without having to spend time navigating through regions in which they are familiar. However, the use of indices to navigate a recording medium places a time consuming and manual burden on the creator to place indices on particular topics in the recording medium. The use of indices has a high cost, which is difficult to justify in environments with highly paid labor.
A need exists for a system and a method for end users to navigate quickly to a region of interest of a recorded presentation or recorded meeting over a network to a segment of a recorded presentation or recorded meeting that does not place a high, time-consuming burden on the creator of the recorded meeting or the recorded presentation.
Other solutions to the use of indices for navigating to an area of interest in a recorded presentation include an automated method for searching and browsing video and audio using automatic speech recognition (ASR). Using ASR has two main shortcomings: firstly, the accuracy of ASR is often a limiting factor for the task as ASR could record the spoken words incorrectly if a speaker has a lisp or an accent, and secondly, ASR requires a user to manually look through search terms to find what the user desires to hear. ASR becomes a significant problem when users are unaware of the topics discussed in the recorded presentation or recorded meeting. Trial and error becomes the only method, when using ASR, to determine the appropriate query terms. Transcription alignment or synchronization is a technique that often solves the problems of ASR errors, however, the cost of transcription alignment and synchronization is high in terms of manual time involved. To use transcription alignment or synchronization, after the meeting is recorded in a recording medium, the meeting is manually transcribed and a text document (file) is created. The file along with the recording media are used as inputs to a text synchronization algorithm the output of which is a data structure that indicates the location (temporal offset) in the recording medium of each word or sentence from the text. The data structure that indicates the location in the recording medium is stored in a database, and at retrieval time, users issue queries against the text and the corresponding recording medium is retrieved. In addition, using ASR creates a significant delay between the time that the recording of the meeting or presentation is made until the time that portions of the meeting can be retrieved.
A need exists for a system and a method that allows end users quick access, without long time delays, to the recordings of presentations and meetings after they occur using a network.
A large range of communication scenarios exists where potential economic and social values are not served by the existing authoring, retrieval and browsing schemes. A need exists for a method that is not time consuming nor entails a high cost in manual time involvement in the recordation and retrieval of data from a presentation or meeting via a network.
The present embodiments meet these needs.